I mentioned before that the wife had bought me a new 24" VIZIO Smart TV for my bench. All I wanted was a monitor for the microscope camera but it is far more. Cranked up the Amazon credit card sucking machine and got an articulated arm for it. It fits perfect. The arm platform for the soldering station fits right under it without interference. Second picture shows it pulled forward but not nearly as far as it can go and it can turn to face me at full extension. The workspace is getting better and better.

I'll recommend that you do (or research online) a color rendering/color gamut test on your new acquisition while you can still return it. TVs usually make poor monitors as they are designed around a limited color reproduction range. The panels are actually different, as are the driving electronics and software. Documents and all-digital video (like that from your microscope camera) will tend to be pretty potato-looking, with poor contrast and color over/under-saturation and artifacts like ghosting/haloing of bright objects.

There's a reason gaming monitors cost so much more, and it isn't JUST marketing; it's different technology.

The defects can be pretty subtle; that's why I'm recommending you research this NOW and be very critical of it while the no-quibble return window is still open, and before you get too attached. Displays sold as being "good for everything" are usually crap-to-barely-passable at any single task.

Ever have a problem keeping your wood stiff Friday Night - Time to go drink Beer and eat food at the Pub

Aww, man... so close, and then the last accordion section broke. Will you be able to epoxy it back together inconspicuously, or will you have to make another 2nd panel? Other than this painful example of the usual CNC/laser pitfalls though, pretty effing nifty. :bull shit:*

We actually have a fiber run 5m from the front of the house and are supposed to get access to it this month. Generally Oz is getting fiber to a node point then copper but we got luckier than most. Still a bastardised system thanks to the muppets in power

Local villages are in the process of getting FTTP installed using overhead fibre on poles. Lots of splice chambers, plastic widgets to coil excess cable without inducing microbending, and connectorised distribution points appearing overhead. The CDPs are made by Corning and use their 'Opti-Tip' weatherproof connectors. Our village has cabling in ducts, though, so I don't expect to see anything better than FTTC here. There were plans to install a new 'fill-in' cabinet/DSLAM locally to me to reduce the copper length, but BT Openreach managed to screw up the planning application paperwork.

All this is to meet the March 2020 deadline for 'universal' 10Mb/s access...

Yeah, as opposed to here where we get "unlimited 100Mb/s" service that's really 5Mb up and damifino down depending on the carrier's mood.

* Okay... I think maybe it's time to get rid of this effing Redragon Mouse and shitpost it on Amazon. It has something wrong with the driver where it will randomly highlight something NOT in the current dialog box and bring it into whatever you're currently typing, as it just did above, now highlighted in red. I thought it was probably just my ancient upgrade-over-upgrade build of Windoze, but it persists even with the brand-new fresh install on my SSD.

My personal confuser is enough of a PITA already, without my mouse literally injecting BULLSHIT into what I'm writing.

mnemYou may now commence with [insert BS-dwagon joke here]...

Wow, we Brits have scored big time here then, well some of us have at least here are my speeds and there is another speed level available to me if I want it, (at a price of course )

Ever have a problem keeping your wood stiff Friday Night - Time to go drink Beer and eat food at the Pub

Aww, man... so close, and then the last accordion section broke. Will you be able to epoxy it back together inconspicuously, or will you have to make another 2nd panel? Other than this painful example of the usual CNC/laser pitfalls though, pretty effing nifty. :bull shit:*

Marine Ply is fairly cheap when you buy it by the sheet so I will just cut another one. I was playing with backing the power down and increasing the speed on the second one and it got stuck on that corner. Ply seems to vary across the panel (more glue maybe) so I need to add a touch to cope with the variation.

Got a few other projects with living hinges on Fusion 360 at present while I am in Ply mode. Then into Metal marking next week as the $100 spray can turned up today.

Yeah I saw that one in my update post this morning, did think about it but thought meh, its only 150MHz, but it is a 4 channel, meh, its Swindon for collection and then the seller couldn't be bothered to picture it switched on or wait...maybe its not working so I lost interest in it TBH, are you going for it then?

Nah can't be arsed. It's 2h from here and I've got to go to Ikea again tomorrow

Plus I'm supposed to be clearing out not accumulating more stuff at the moment.

It is worth £150-200 on ebay though... hmm

Yep, I thought was the case, but I don't know yet what the final damage to my wallet is going to be yet for yesterdays escapade and to think that I was just yesterday thinking that I was doing well with the battery being 5 years old and it never fails to start at the first attempt without all the churning over that my neighbours cars seem to go through

Nah can't be arsed. It's 2h from here and I've got to go to Ikea again tomorrow

Plus I'm supposed to be clearing out not accumulating more stuff at the moment.

It is worth £150-200 on ebay though... hmm

Yep, I thought was the case, but I don't know yet what the final damage to my wallet is going to be yet for yesterdays escapade and to think that I was just yesterday thinking that I was doing well with the battery being 5 years old and it never fails to start at the first attempt without all the churning over that my neighbours cars seem to go through

Hope its not too much. It isn't one of those horrid stop start ones is it? Those are pricey. Purposely avoided getting one of them.

As for your neighbours' cars, same here. Bloody awful noises. Most of those noises were me until I got rid of the Fiat though

Figured by the time you fish out £16 for fuel, £10 for dinner, £30 in capacitors and 4 hours round trip, screw it!

If only that was generally available to the public at attractive rates of course

EDIT:OMG have we opened up yet another detour from the core topic

It is pretty cheap. Costs me £8 a day. I use it perhaps 3 days a week as you can power it off and pay nothing while it's not running. Use it about 35 weeks a year. £840/year. That's for a 16 core Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 machine with 64Gb of RAM, 10Gb ethernet right into amazon's backbone and 3.5GBPS persistent storage (I use 512 gig volume).

Main thing is no up front cost! To buy the same workstation would cost me at least £8k up front plus the electricity bill.

I'll recommend that you do (or research online) a color rendering/color gamut test on your new acquisition while you can still return it. TVs usually make poor monitors as they are designed around a limited color reproduction range. The panels are actually different, as are the driving electronics and software. Documents and all-digital video (like that from your microscope camera) will tend to be pretty potato-looking, with poor contrast and color over/under-saturation and artifacts like ghosting/haloing of bright objects.

There's a reason gaming monitors cost so much more, and it isn't JUST marketing; it's different technology.

The defects can be pretty subtle; that's why I'm recommending you research this NOW and be very critical of it while the no-quibble return window is still open, and before you get too attached. Displays sold as being "good for everything" are usually crap-to-barely-passable at any single task.

mnemYou may now commence with [insert BS-dwagon joke here]...

Thanks for the reminder. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the differences. But considering that it is primarily for viewing images from mymicroscope, it does fine. The refresh rate of 60 is sufficient that there is no motion blur from the camera, the picture is crisp enough, and even if the colors are slightly off, well I'm a bit colorblind, anyway. The fact it has TV capabilities is why I said better.

For now, it works fine. Besides, I'm not going to tell her I wanted better unit. She's so pleased to get it for me as a impromtu gift that I'll just go with the flow.

On my win10 machines those services were stopped. I share with no password and if credential is asked I use "guest" and empty password. I have multiple win10 here with win7 and nt4 sharing.

This is only on my lan and I don't really want to bother with password.

My experience with Microsoft help is that it's been no help. I always seem to muddle through it myself and eventually figure it out. WIN10 Release 1803 did away with homegroup BUT MS stated that it would retain your current settings. It did. All my shares continued to work. But MS lied. Release 1903 screwed with it and blew me up. As I stated the other day after hours of trying this and that I got everything back and I can share files back and forth between WIN10 and WIN7 without having to enter passwords nor logging in. As long as they are up I just click and go.

My experience with Microsoft help is that it's been no help. I always seem to muddle through it myself and eventually figure it out. WIN10 Release 1803 did away with homegroup BUT MS stated that it would retain your current settings. It did. All my shares continued to work. But MS lied. Release 1903 screwed with it and blew me up. As I stated the other day after hours of trying this and that I got everything back and I can share files back and forth between WIN10 and WIN7 without having to enter passwords nor logging in. As long as they are up I just click and go.

Local villages are in the process of getting FTTP installed using overhead fibre on poles. Lots of splice chambers, plastic widgets to coil excess cable without inducing microbending, and connectorised distribution points appearing overhead. The CDPs are made by Corning and use their 'Opti-Tip' weatherproof connectors. Our village has cabling in ducts, though, so I don't expect to see anything better than FTTC here. There were plans to install a new 'fill-in' cabinet/DSLAM locally to me to reduce the copper length, but BT Openreach managed to screw up the planning application paperwork.Yeah, as opposed to here where we get "unlimited 100Mb/s" service that's really 5Mb up and damifino down depending on the carrier's mood.

* Okay... I think maybe it's time to get rid of this effing Redragon Mouse and shitpost it on Amazon. It has something wrong with the driver where it will randomly highlight something NOT in the current dialog box and bring it into whatever you're currently typing, as it just did above, now highlighted in red. I thought it was probably just my ancient upgrade-over-upgrade build of Windoze, but it persists even with the brand-new fresh install on my SSD.

My personal confuser is enough of a PITA already, without my mouse literally injecting BULLSHIT into what I'm writing.

mnemYou may now commence with [insert BS-dwagon joke here]...

Wow, we Brits have scored big time here then, well some of us have at least here are my speeds and there is another speed level available to me if I want it, (at a price of course )

Oh, we can get all different tiers of service too... and they ARE generally faster the more you pay. It's just that what you pay for vs what you're sold vs what you actually get is roughly akin to buying a car from this guy. With the added joy of paying for an Escalade, while waking up one morning with a Camaro in the garage, and a Yugo the next, and occasionally getting a shift in mid-drive from a Rav4 to a Zamboni...

On the "BULLSHIT psycho-mouse from hell on acid" front, after searching on the ReDragon site yet AGAIN and finding bupkis, I did a Guurgle search for the model number... after poking several new hits, I found one that appears to lead to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ReDragon support site/page, which has a driver download for this mouse. Why the eff didn't the main site redirect me to this? No effing idea.

It doesn't appear to change the driver, though... still looks to be using the built-in Windoze HID-compliant driver. So no idea yet if resetting things like polling speed will make the crazy go away.

Naaahhh.... I've gotten to a point where I do notice the lag, and the wakeup delay from wireless mice annoys the fuck out of me. I think this may be an issue of the mouse having more features than I know what to do with, and I REALLY like the responsiveness of 7200dpi, so I fear I'm going to HAVE TO suck it up and LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY.

I'll recommend that you do (or research online) a color rendering/color gamut test on your new acquisition while you can still return it. TVs usually make poor monitors as they are designed around a limited color reproduction range. The panels are actually different, as are the driving electronics and software. Documents and all-digital video (like that from your microscope camera) will tend to be pretty potato-looking, with poor contrast and color over/under-saturation and artifacts like ghosting/haloing of bright objects.

There's a reason gaming monitors cost so much more, and it isn't JUST marketing; it's different technology.

The defects can be pretty subtle; that's why I'm recommending you research this NOW and be very critical of it while the no-quibble return window is still open, and before you get too attached. Displays sold as being "good for everything" are usually crap-to-barely-passable at any single task.

mnemYou may now commence with [insert BS-dwagon joke here]...

Thanks for the reminder. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the differences. But considering that it is primarily for viewing images from mymicroscope, it does fine. The refresh rate of 60 is sufficient that there is no motion blur from the camera, the picture is crisp enough, and even if the colors are slightly off, well I'm a bit colorblind, anyway. The fact it has TV capabilities is why I said better.

For now, it works fine. Besides, I'm not going to tell her I wanted better unit. She's so pleased to get it for me as a impromtu gift that I'll just go with the flow.

https://youtu.be/rSk_37So0Xk Oh, well then... since it's a gift from her, even if it is totally potato, you'd better learn to like it. Just like gladOS.

While I'm still working on the RCA scope and Heath scope I'm looking ahead as to my next project. And this is it. Heathkit S-3 Electronic Switch. For those not familiar with one of these it allows you to view 2 traces on a single trace scope. Your signals essentially ride on a square wave but you sync on the signals. I bought this one about 35 years ago at a garage sale. It did work and I used it a few times. But it hasn't been powered up in about 30 years and it's been a closet queen ever since. So it's going to need a clean up and complete rebuild/repair.